Rangers GM Jon Daniels: We have approval to take Rangers' payroll even higher

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Louis DeLuca/Staff Photographer

A LOOK AT THE RANGERS' 2013 PAYROLL OBLIGATIONS: The Rangers currently have just over $116 million in payroll commitments for the 2013 season -- $106 million to 17 players with guaranteed contracts, and another $10 million headed to Philly to help pay for Michael Young's deal. Here's a look at the Rangers' 2013 payroll commitments, according to Baseball Prospectus. NOTE: This list does not include players on minor league deals or those who are not yet arbitration eligible (like Alexi Ogando, Mitch Moreland, Craig Gentry and others).

Rangers General Manager Jon Daniels answered questions in a chat on Thursday. Here are some highlights.

Payroll wise, how are you doing this year? Have you been told to expect a jump in the payroll budget as the new TV deal kicks in, or are the owners subsidizing the budget until the deal starts (and therefore the budget remains in the area it currently is)?

Our payroll will be up from where it was last year. We had approval from ownership to take it further than where it currently sits, but we didn't find the right situations to extend ourselves on. The new TV deal actually doesn't kick in for a couple of years still - ownership has increased payroll to the higher levels in the meantime because they are committed to fielding a championship club year in and year out. They have been unbelievably supportive of our baseball group.

A lot of questions about why we didn't sign certain free agents. Let me address that generally. Our commitment to you (the fans), our players, our ownership group, and ourselves, is to keep our window to win open for years to come. We expect to win. We don't want to go back to the lean years. We've shown we'll trade prospects (Cliff Lee, Adams, Uehara, Dempster, Molina, etc), sign our own (MYoung, Kinsler, Harrison, Holland, etc) and sign free agents (Darvish, Beltre, Nathan etc) when the time and fit is right. It's a balancing act in some regards. The surest way for us to short circuit what we've got going on is to get an old club with a bloated payroll. That sometimes means letting a player go if the contract might hold us back elsewhere, or if we feel the back end of the deal doesn't fit for where we are. In the end, I'm confident that as long as we continue to win, our fans will embrace the club. We genuinely like the team we're going to field this year - and we've got a lot of flexibility to adjust as we go.

You just said: 'The surest way for us to short circuit what we've got going on is to get an old club with a bloated payroll.' The club currently is the 4th oldest team in the majors, if I'm not mistaken... Doesn't signing Berkman, frasor and AJ contradict that notion?

Fair point. I should clarify. Short term deals are a little different.

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